RFC 808

Summary of computer mail services meeting held at BBN on 10 January 1979

📅 published March 1982, from ietf

RFC 808: Summary of Computer Mail Services Meeting Held at BBN on 10 January 1979 💌

Okay bestie, this one is by J. Postel from ISI, filed under the Network Working Group 💖, and it's dated 1 March 1982. It's a summary of a computer mail meeting at BBN on 10 January 1979. The original doesn't list a category or say what it obsoletes or updates, so I'm not guessing 🙈.

Introduction ✨

Bestie, this note is a very belated attempt to document a meeting that happened three years before it was written 😭. The point was to talk about computer mail in the ARPA community, figure out where things stood, and reach some conclusions to guide how mail systems kept developing, so that there'd still be one coherent total mail service 🎀.

Some important conclusions came out of that meeting. They limited how much new features mail systems were allowed to add on top of the existing service and specifications. The sad part is that the meeting and its conclusions were never documented, and the specifications never got revised, so the mail service kept having problems 💀.

Due to the passage of time these notes are necessarily quite incomplete. It's thought there were a bunch of other attendees too. Postel wanted to thank the people who helped provide the info, especially Vint Cerf, Jack Haverty, Danny Cohen, Bob Thomas, and Debbie Deutsch 🫶.

The Meeting Announcement 📣

On 10 January 1979 there was a meeting at BBN in Cambridge, MA, starting at 0930, to talk about Message Service support on the ARPANET 🦋. The purpose was to provide a basis for any standardization of efforts that might be needed. The plan was to take stock of the message services already around on the ARPANET, discuss problems between different message systems, review current protocols, and review what was coming next. Everyone was supposed to come ready to talk about current problems they knew about and any developments that would affect future message service 🔥.

The Meeting Agenda 📋

  1. Present State of Affairs
    • Survey of Message Systems
    • Current Problems
    • Format Protocols: RFC 560, 680, 733
    • Distribution Service
    • Documentation
  2. Future Developments in Message Technology
    • Multi-Media Techniques
    • Impact of Personal Computers
    • Distributed Service
      • NSW Project
      • Internetwork Addressing and Forwarding
    • Other
  3. Impact of Charging Technology on the Message Service
    • Protocols
    • Distribution of Messages
  4. Managing the Message Service 🧚
  5. Supporting the Message Service 🌸

Talks 🎤

  1. Duane Adams opened the meeting. He said we should care about computer mail as a total message service, not just as a local user interface 👑. He also asked what impact internetting and multimedia developments would have on the message service 🌈.
  2. Dave Farber gave a bit of history of mail systems, listing every system anybody had ever heard of (see Appendix A) 📜. It was noted that most of the mail systems weren't formal projects (as in, explicitly sponsored research), just things that "just happened" 😭.
  3. Ted Myer chaired a discussion of current problems in mail systems. R. Stallman, D. Farber, P. Santos, K. Harrenstien, R. Kunzelman, T. Knight, B. Thomas, D. Lebling, J. Haverty, D. Cohen, D. Adams, V. Cerf, and A. Vezza all chimed in too 🙈.

It was mostly gripes about what this or that mail system did wrong 💅. The topics included:

  • use of MLFL instead of MAIL
  • fully qualifying all the usernames with hostnames on all the addresses
  • immediate feedback about whether the addressed user has a mailbox at the destination host, or getting an error message later
  • host table update problems
  • strange FTP replies (e.g., "System going down in 10 minutes")
  • addressing issues

Some things were also mentioned that might be added to the current systems ✨. The topics were:

  • virtual hosts (e.g., NSW)
  • internetted hosts
  • authentication
  • message identification
  • duplicate detection
  • spoofing
  • multicopy delivery
  • limits on receipt
  • program to program mail
  • structured typed data
  • graphics
  • fax
  • voice

At the end of this session someone said that further work was just putting patches on patches 💀. They said we should make a commitment to a version 2 system. There should be an edict that says "this is it", and the current mail service should be frozen 🫠.

  1. Debbie Deutsch talked about some work being done at BBN on multimedia mail 🎀.

Debbie went over the options for including other types of data (voice, graphics, fax, numeric, executable) in messages, and for structuring messages so the different types of data get identified and tied together 🦋. The main choice is between encoding the data in ASCII and using keyword field identifiers, or using a binary typed structured format. The current work was trying to fit fax data handling into an existing text mail system. Copies of the viewgraphs were handed out 📎.

  1. There was a discussion of Personal Computers 💻.

Tom Knight gave a short description of the Lisp Machine project 🧠.

There was some general talk about how personal computers would affect mail services. The big realization was that a personal computer won't be available to handle incoming mail all the time 😩. Personal computer users would probably keep their mailboxes on some big brother computer (maybe one dedicated to mailbox service, or a general purpose host) and poll for their mail when they wanted to read it 📬. A few concerns about accountability and accounting were raised too.

  1. Bob Thomas talked about ideas for routing mail between regular mailboxes on ARPANET Hosts and mailboxes of NSW users 🛰️.

The big point is that an NSW user isn't a user of any specific host, so the idea of a mailbox being user@host just doesn't work 🙅‍♀️. Bob suggested thinking of NSW as a virtual host. The implementation of this mail service for NSW users was meant to keep new code and changes to existing programs to a minimum. Bob described his ideas for address formats for sending messages between NSW users, from NSW users to ARPANET users, and from ARPANET users to NSW users, and said the last one was the hardest to pull off 😤. Copies of the viewgraphs were handed out, and copies of a memo were handed out too (BBN NSW Working Note 24) 📄.

  1. Jon Postel talked about the ideas he had for internet multimedia mail systems 💜.

Two parts of this were a general approach to addressing and routing for mail distribution, and using a structure of typed data elements to represent the message data and control 🧩.

  1. There was some discussion of other work in mail services 🌍.

Someone talked about the work of ANSI X3 S33 on message structure and protocol. Dave Farber described what IFIP TC 6.5 has been doing on international message services. Ted Myer described the interest of the US Congress Office of Technology Assesment (OTA) in electronic communication 🏛️.

General Discussion 💬

It was suggested that we need to look at the problems of building a total message service instead of individual message systems 🌟.

Overall, people felt the current message service was kinda out of control, with incompatible variations and extensions 😵‍💫. There were several times when a minor change to one mail system caused unexpected problems in another 💥.

Part of the reason seemed to be the variations the protocol allowed, especially since most systems only partially implemented it 🙃.

The plan for fixing this had two parts 🛠️:

First, a few minor further changes were allowed, but full implementation of the protocol (RFC 733) was generally not going to be carried out. If there were questions about a particular change, Duane Adams would decide whether it was allowed or not 👑. The goal was to quickly stabilize the mail service into a useful state ✨.

  • In particular, if a small number of senders were doing something that was incompatible with the total service, they'd be asked to stop doing it. Or, if a small number of receivers couldn't handle something that most systems do, they'd be asked to handle that feature 🫶.

Second, work was going to focus on defining and implementing a next-generation mail service that would fix all the existing problems and include facilities for voice, fax, and graphics data 🚀.

The use of structured data in the next-generation mail service got approved 🎉. Jack Haverty noted that RFC 713 specified a language, MSDTP, that could be used to define a structured mail protocol 📘.

Conclusions 🏁

A. Existing Mail Services 🧾

  1. Mail SHALL NOT be sent between hosts if it breaks existing mail programs.

Outlawed by this rule are:

  • a. Spaces in user names.
  • b. Multiple at signs in mailboxes.
  1. Features of RFC 733 that are generally unimplemented SHALL remain unimplemented, and are decommitted from the specification.

Outlawed by this rule are:

  • a. "Include" and "Postal" type addresses.
  1. Duane Adams will arbitrate disputes 👑.
  2. There SHALL be no more changes to the MAIL/MLFL FTP reply codes 🚫.

B. New Mail Services 🌈

  1. New services SHOULD be provided in the context of the experimental multimedia mail systems now being planned 🦋.

Action Items 📝

  1. Jon Postel is to circulate a draft specification of a structured mail protocol by 15-Feb-79 💌.
[* This became IEN-85 published in March 1979 and now superseded by RFCs 759 and 767. *]
  1. Everyone is to submit a 2 to 3 page position paper on addressing to Duane Adams by 1-Mar-79 📄.
  2. Everyone is to submit a 2 to 3 page position paper on System Architecture and Message Transmission by 1-Apr-79 🎀.

Appendix A: First Preliminary List of ARPANET Mail Systems ✨

okay bestie, this appendix is the ARPANET mail hall of fame 📮🦋 It's a first preliminary list, so think of it as a rough draft of who was running what mail software, put together by Dave Farber. Here's the list exactly as it was written, since the details matter:

             First Preliminary List of ARPANET Mail Systems

      Center;by Dave Farber

   Mail System         Authors          Machines

   SNDMSG              Antiquity        Tenex, TOPS-20
   READMAIL            Antiquity        TEXEX, TOPS-20
   RD                  Larry Roberts    TENEX, TOPS-20
   MSG                 Vittal           TENEX (18 SITES)
   HERMES              BBN              TENEX (14 SITES)
   HG                  Calvin
   MAIL                Werme            TOPS-10 on KA and KL10 CMU
   RDMAIL              Karlton          TOPS-10 on KA and KL10 CMU
   COMSAT              KLH              MIT-MC,-AI,-ML
   MAIL/QMAIL (1)      KLH              MIT-MC,-AI,-ML
   BABYL               EAK              MIT-MC,-AI,-ML
   FTPS (2)            KLH              MIT-MC,-AI,-ML
   SIGMA               ISI              Dedicated TENEX
   MAILSTAT (3)        BBN              TENEX, TOPS-20
   FTP (2)             BBN              TENEX, TOPS-20
   MAILER (3)          BBN              TENEX, TOPS-20
   MM                  MMcM@AI          SRI-KL
   BANANARD            Yonke            TENEX
   MSG Version 1       UCB - RAND       PDP 11 UNIX
   SNDMSG (UNIX)       UCB - RAND       PDP 11 UNIX
   MS                  D. Crocker       PDP 11 UNIX
   MSG Version 2       D. Crocker       PDP 11 UNIX
   MH                  Borden           RAND-UNIX
   Read-mail (1)       Palter & Sibert  Multics all
   print-mail          Palter & Sibert  Multics all
   send-mail           Palter & Sibert  Multics all
   MSGH                Ness at Wharton  Wharton 10
   Wharton Mail System Ness at Wharton  Wharton 10
   SWAMP               Guyton           IBM 370 Wilber
   MSG                 Antiquity        HARVARD and RUTGERS 10
   MAIL (1)            Harvey           SU-AI-10
   RCV (Mail reader)   Harvey           SU-AI-10
   DMSG                (Private)        TENEX
   READMAIL                -            LL IBM VM/370
   RD                  Haines           LL IBM VM/370
   $NETMAIL               ?             AMES-67

   (1)  mail sender
   (2)  FTP server
   (3)  service system

Look at this little zoo 🦁 SNDMSG, READMAIL, and RD all show up on TENEX or TOPS-20, and a whole bunch of MIT machines are running the same group of tools. Some entries have no author listed at all, and some say "Antiquity," which is giving old-school legend energy 👑

Attendees 💅

The people who were in the room (or on the line) are listed below, with their organisation and mailbox, exactly as the original has them:

   Name                 Org     Mailbox

   Duane Adams          ARPA    Adams@ISIA
   Bill Carlson         ARPA    Carlson@ISIA
   Vint Cerf            ARPA    Cerf@ISIA
   Jerry Burchfiel      BBN     Burchfiel@BBNA
   Debbie Deutsch       BBN     DDeutsch@BBNA
   Jack Haverty         BBN     Haverty@BBN-Unix
   Charles Khuen        BBN     Khuen@BBNC
   Mark Lavin           BBN     MLavin@BBNE
   Charlotte Mooers     BBN     Mooers@BBNE
   Ted Myer             BBN     Myer@BBNA
   Ray Nickerson        BBN     Nickerson@BBNC
   Paul Santos          BBN     Santos@BBNE
   Bob Thomas           BBN     BThomas@BBND
   Mike Wingfield       BBN     Wingfield@BBND
   Joanne Sattley       CCA     JZS@CCA
   Howard Wactlar       CMU     Wactlar@CMU-10A
   James Pool           DOE     Pool@BBN
   Robert McNab         DCA     DCACode535@ISIA
   Ed Cain              DCEC    Cain@EDN-Unix
   Warren Hawrylko      DCEC    Lyons@ISIA
   Harry Helm           DCEC    Lyons@ISIA
   Danny Cohen          ISI     Cohen@ISIB
   Jon Postel           ISI     Postel@ISIF
   Dave Lebling         MIT     PDL@MIT-XX
   Tom Knight           MIT     TK@MIT-AI
   R. Stallman          MIT     RMS@MIT-AI
   Pat Winston          MIT     PHW@MIT-AI
   Al Vezza             MIT     AV@MIT-DMS
   Wayne Shiveley       OFDA    ---
   Bob Anderson         RAND    Anderson@RAND-Unix
   Ken Harrenstien      SRI     KLH@SRI-NIC
   Ron Kunzelman        SRI     Kunzelman@SRI-KL
   Dave Farber          UDEL    Farber@UDEL

That's a seriously stacked guest list 🌈 ARPA, BBN, MIT, ISI, and SRI are all showing up, plus a few more orgs. Some people don't have a mailbox listed at all, and you can see a couple of mailboxes shared across people, which is very much a "we all used the same box" kind of moment 🙈

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